Family history

Several years ago, my father and a close friend were bird-hunting when my father was shot by his friend. Both lawyers, my father had been turned down for service in World War II while his friend had gained an officer's commission and had only just been discharged from the Army.
I was not quite four. My father would go into surgery, lose the sight in his right eye and by some miracle keep his left eye intact. He was hospitalized at the same hospital where I had been born and he would remain there for the next year.
My mother lacked a driver's license so she quickly mobilized and was driving soon. I was terrified of the visiting nurse who seemed to be inside our home for an eternity. I can remember her shooing me away from the room in much the same manner as a prison guard might. Ironically, during the long spell that my father was hospitalized, friendly nurses actually brought me to his room through what seemed like a secret passage. He was always lying on his back and was told not to move around much, he said. We tried to communicate, the son and the bandaged father. I vividly recall one visit when he asked if I wanted to share part of a grapefruit with him. Now, years later, the sight of a grapefruit instantly brings that back. And I do love grapefruit.
My father was leery of drugs due to his younger sisters' involvement with "those jazz musicians and drugs" years earlier. He always maintained that during the landmark surgery to keep his left eye, no drugs were and the surgeons working on him would sometimes tell him to imagine moving an eyeball in an effort to make the surgery a success.
He was a close friend of the surgeon as well, who was heard to remark after the operation that he and all of my father's other friends would long outlive him.
He was wrong. My father had outlived the surgeon and the shooter by at least two decades when he eventually died in 1984. It was the anniversary of D-Day. The surgeon, whose ranch I often visited near as a teenager, would die in Colorado on a bear-hunting trip, found near his car, an apparent suicide. The man who shot my father campaigned for the governership of our state more than once and came within a whisker of winning. He also died from an apparent suicide.
Our families had been close and it was probably a bit surreal for my father that as he was being wheeled into the hospital for his final days, one son of the shooter was leaving in a wheelchair, diagnosed with cancer, I was told. Pushing his wheelchair was another son of the man who had gone hunting with my father on that fateful day. His role, other than that of son and brother, was that he was the doctor in charge of emergency services at the hospital.
While my father was a practicing attorney, he often campaigned for his close friend, stumping for him in remote hamlets, when the candidate himself could not be there. He seemed tireless.
No one could have expected my father to lead a normal life after being shot and blinded in one eye. He was extremely careful never to let his driver's license lapse, lest he have to take an eye exam. Until the day he died, he carried bird shot under the skin of his arms and head. He wore a glass eye and quietly underwrote guide dog training for those who were completely blind and in need of a helping hand.
He had been an avid hunter and sportsman up until the time of the accident. I remember mother telling me how he had subsequently thrown out his guns and all his other sports equipment.
The one part of this account that no one ever seems to believe is how I was often bedded down under his hospital bed after the accident and told not to make a sound. I didn't. I can still remember one of the kind nurses actually opening the window and parking me outside on the fire escape to evade the rounds of a supervisor for a short time. I have no witnesses, I've outlived them all, but after what had happened, after all these years, it remains vivid in my memory....